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by J. Carson Black

  But to be on the safe side, Jerry had driven out to the pullout and removed all the rocks and debris from a ten-foot-by-ten-foot area of dirt, the place where Max might conceivably fall.

  They’d just have to deliver Max there in a timely manner.

  Jerry took another sip of scotch. “As far as livor mortis goes—”

  “Livor mortis?”

  “It’s another word for lividity. How the blood sinks to the bottom of a person when he dies. Remember? Anyway, we don’t have to worry about the woman and the girl, especially if we just shove them in the backseat of their car like the bad guy would do. Any way they land is fine. Especially after we roll the car down that hill.”

  They went back to the beginning. When the woman and her daughter arrived at the mall, they would be ushered onto the soundstage. Max would be there, hopefully still disoriented from over twenty-four hours in the isolation tank, and easy to manipulate.

  They’d shoot him first, two to the heart with a .22. The mother would be next, and the little girl last, since she would be easiest to kill.

  “How far do we go with the mother?” Gordon asked.

  “Pants off—I told her they can wear casual clothes, so I’m guessing it’ll be pants. And maybe her underwear. Maybe tear something, but we have to make sure to use gloves. We don’t want to leave any hair follicles or microscopic bits of skin, dander, anything like that. And jumpsuits. Whoever places them where they need to be has to wear a jumpsuit and a shower cap over a hairnet. Use the precautions in the DePaulentis plan.”

  “And where are we going to hide whoever’s going to do it, do you think, Jerry? If the mom and the kid see some guy in a jumpsuit, rubber gloves, and a shower cap over a hairnet, alarm bells could go off. People have a sixth sense about things. We’re no different from animals, when you come right down to it. We can sense danger. We don’t want this to be a mess, Jerry.”

  They would put the mother and daughter in the car and drive them out to the pullout, then a half mile farther on, push the car over the embankment. They would transport Max to the site in the box truck.

  “Careful to keep him in the same position,” Jerry stressed.

  “Agreed.” Gordon got himself a drink and sat down again. “I’m worried about that twelve miles to the pullout. That’s a lot of time on the road.”

  “No it’s not.”

  “Two cars? Transporting three bodies? Any time on the road is dangerous. Someone could see us.”

  “What are they going to see, Gord? Someone driving by. It’ll be dark by then. All they’ll see is headlights, and who notices what kind of cars are on the road anyway? Do you know that the least reliable evidence of guilt comes from eyewitnesses? Eyewitnesses, generally speaking, suck. Part of that time they’ll be on the road, they have to go past the RV park…Don’t look at me like that, Gord, it’s no big deal. Night, remember? And Max’s car will go about a half hour later, so they’re not even seen together on the road. Trust me. Nobody’s going to notice a thing. The mother and daughter will be covered up, and Max will be in the cargo truck.”

  Jerry added, “The main objective is to make sure Max is laid out just the way he hit the floor on the soundstage. That could be a dangerous window of time—but it’s a short one. And we’ll be doing it when it’s dark. We straight on this?”

  “We’re straight.”

  “Good.”

  Chapter Forty-Two

  CONCENTRATE.

  Max knew how easily he could lose all sense of time and space, and worse, his own identity. It wasn’t just disorientation. The word disorientation was nothing compared to what he knew would happen to him. He couldn’t feel his hands, his feet, he couldn’t smell anything, he couldn’t hear anything, he couldn’t see anything. He felt nothing against his body, no pressure at all, as if he’d been wrapped in cotton wool. There was no point of reference. He knew he’d lose all sense of time, he knew he would lie suspended in the darkness, lost, desperate, unable to hear his own cries for help. And he knew it would come on him fast. The hallucinations would take over and he would be completely lost. He needed to concentrate. He bit his lip so he could feel something. The sharp pain, the taste of blood. It helped. He needed to think about one thing. One word, one mantra—a chant that would keep him sane. He flailed around for a word, any word, for that one clear thought, but panic began to consume him.

  Think!

  He couldn’t.

  Think think think think think.

  But nothing came. Nothing.

  Amazing to think he’d once used drugs and alcohol to blur his senses, to disorient himself.

  And then, from somewhere, it came to him, one tiny word. Freeze.

  Freeze. The word Gordon had used against him. Programmed into him: Freeze.

  What was the opposite of “Freeze”? Don’t Freeze. He backed it up with another thought. If they tell you to freeze, don’t. Don’t freeze. Move. And move fast.

  His lips formed the words. “Freeze, Move.” He made no sound, but he could feel his lips moving. They still belonged to him. He kept moving his lips: Freeze, Move. Over and over. Freeze, Move. Freeze, Move. Freeze, Move!

  He started to drift, lassitude spreading to his arms, his legs, his whole body. Had to fight against it, hold on to those two words by the most tenuous thread, as if he were tethered to a balloon.

  When they came for him, when they got him out of here, he knew what he would do.

  MOVE.

  III: THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

  Chapter Forty-Three

  JERRY WAS HAVING a late lunch outside on the deck when Gordon walked up, pulled out a chair, and sat down.

  Breaking the mood completely.

  “I was thinking,” Jerry said. “There’s that ramp down to the loading dock at the outlet mall, where the big trucks go in. With the high wall? That’s where we can hide the truck, the woman’s car, and Max’s—”

  “Shaun’s a no-show.”

  “What?”

  “She’s still missing. Which means, we don’t have a shooter.”

  “Missing? Maybe she’s embarrassed because she couldn’t find Max. I sure hope you’re not going to pay her anything. Some assassin she turned out to be. Hell, I’ll do it,” Jerry added. Right now he felt as if he could do anything.

  “You’re not a real assassin.”

  “She wasn’t much of one either. What do you think, she decided to go on vacation in the middle of a job?”

  “We don’t know what happened.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  Gordon said, “We need a real shooter. Someone who can drill him from a couple of feet away with a .22, straight through the heart. It sounds easy, but it’s only a .22. You can’t do that. I can’t do that. Most people can’t.”

  Jerry understood what Gordon was saying. The .22 was a deal-breaker. They wanted a small, clean wound, not only to avoid copious amounts of blood that would impede their ability to stage the body elsewhere, but also in case the paparazzi managed to pay their way into the morgue and snap photos. A big, bloody hole would ding Max’s market value. “What about Dave Finley?” Jerry said.

  “Can he shoot?”

  “He’s a stunt man. He can do all that kind of stuff. He certainly would do a better job than we would.”

  There was a commotion by the pool.

  Jerry shaded his eyes. “What’s going on?”

  “Dave’s putting on a show as we speak. We’re keeping the paparazzi back, but they’ve got the telephotos out in force. They think they’re getting some good shots. If I do say so myself, he looks good in that white Speedo. Hale and hearty—healed of his addiction and ready to reunite with his wife.”

  “And baby.”

  Gordon said, “Don’t remind me.”

  “He look different to you?” Jerry asked.

  “Max?”

  “No, Dave. He looks…I dunno. Almost like he’s had some work done.”

  Gordon stared at him. “Work done?”

  “You kno
w, a tuck here, a snip there. Work. He looks, I know this is going to sound crazy, but the more I see him, the more he seems to look like Max.”

  “He’s his stunt double. Of course he looks like Max.”

  “I suppose…” It wasn’t important. “So what happens next?”

  “Dave’s going to climb into the Cadillac Max rented and drive off into the sunset.”

  Jerry pictured grainy shots of Max behind the wheel of the car, maybe hiding his face a little, not willing to give the paps a good shot.

  Perfect. “You think he can pull it off?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Jerry said, “You know Max screwed Dave’s wife.”

  “Yeah. That’s what I’m counting on.”

  Chapter Forty-Four

  SHAUN HAD BAILED from the truck just as it hit the guardrail. This had been more luck than anything else—she’d shoved the door open, and before it had a chance to slam back on her, managed to dive for the asphalt. She’d caught it exactly right, the guardrail slowing the truck for just an instant.

  Luck.

  In her stuntwoman days, Shaun had jumped from cars at least ten times, but she’d had a lot of help—wires and such—and most of it was illusion. But she knew to tuck her shoulder in, curl into a ball, and roll. Easier said than done, but the trees and bushes on the edge had caught her fall. She’d kept rolling until she hit something hard and it all went black.

  Shaun had been out for hours. Her bloody face had stuck to the rock she’d run into.

  Take stock. She moved each leg. Moved each arm. Moved her neck. She was OK. Felt her face and head with her fingers. There were lacerations on her forehead, her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids. A copious scalp wound. Her leg felt as if it had been slashed in two by a razor blade—she guessed it had caught the edge of the guardrail. Heat radiated from the bone, feverish. Possibly there were internal injuries. She felt like glass had broken inside, somewhere in her pelvic region, but ignored it.

  Her boy.

  It took her two hours to get down to the truck, and it would take her half a day to get back up. She slid down the hill on her cheeks. Turned over and crawled through the dirt and dry, cutting grass. She staggered to her feet, then crawled again.

  There had been no police cars. No sirens. No rescue workers. No helicopters. The truck had come to rest against a big juniper. It looked like part of the juniper’s shadow.

  Her boy was in there.

  Her boy.

  He’d been incinerated.

  She didn’t recognize the thing strapped into the passenger side. It was mostly soot. If she touched it, it would crumble and flake off on her hands. Tendons in the arms curled up like a boxer’s; there was some red gleam of muscle and the smell of cooked meat.

  “My boy,” she whispered. Her voice was harsh; her vocal cords could barely grab purchase.

  She reached in to touch what was left of his face. Jellied eyes stared out at her, resentful. “You should have listened to me,” she said. “I tried to look after you.”

  She’d told him not to go after Conroy. But he was a boy. Boys were risk-takers. They died.

  But this was her son.

  And now she couldn’t take him with her anymore. She pressed her fingertip into his chin, the grinning bone, the finger skating through something that might have been soot or might have been flesh. The residue clung to her index finger. Part of her son. Part of him. She streaked it on her lacerated forehead and on her cheeks like war paint. She inhaled him.

  Shaun couldn’t take the rest of him with her, so she started back up the slope.

  MAX CONCENTRATED ON the one single word, “move,” while he waited for the hallucinations, the paranoia, the blind fear to take hold. He would lose all sense of time and space. Of self. He knew he would lose touch with reality, but more than that, he would lose touch with his core, the thing that made him Max Conroy. He would be reduced to a thin, terrified voice crying in the wilderness.

  Max expected this. He kept chanting the word “move” to himself, all the while gearing himself up. Be prepared, he thought. Just try to remember the word “move.”

  But nothing happened.

  He continued to be Max.

  And pretty soon, his thoughts branched out from the word “move.” He began to think, to plan. How would he get out of this situation, what could he do? He thought about the script Darren had given him to read, his one or two lines. The girl, the mother, the car. And a strange thing happened. He was becoming stronger, not weaker.

  Max lay in the tank, touching nothing. No sensation on his skin, no sense of smell, no taste, nothing to hear, no one to reach out to. But he felt a presence. Realized with surprise who it was. The deputy-turned-detective. Her calm eyes, her proximity. Bide your time, she seemed to say. The idea that he was not alone, that she was somehow here with him, perhaps even looking for him, bolstered his courage. Plan for every contingency, she told him. Be ready. He held onto that—an inner flame that glowed inside him, like a bright green fire.

  Be ready.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  DAVE FINLEY SLID into the seat of the Cadillac CTS-V sports coupe, careful to stare straight ahead. A profile was easier to fake than a full-on shot. The paps were kept out by the barred fence surrounding the healing center. He couldn’t hear their cameras clicking, but he could see the long telephotos pushed through the bars. Plenty of other people had snapped photos of him today—everybody had a cell phone—but he knew from experience how people accepted him at face value. No one had ever questioned that Dave was Max when they went on their little adventures. Not in all the years they had switched places.

  A couple of paps followed—one on a motorcycle and two in cars.

  Dave was good at evasive driving and knew all the tricks. He and Max had ditched a lot of paparazzi in their time.

  Once he’d shed the paps, he drove down into the Verde Valley.

  He was supposed to take Argos Road, a two-lane that headed out into the wilderness to the west. But as he drove, he thought, Maybe I should just take the Cadillac and keep on going.

  What was he thinking when he told Gordon he’d have no problem shooting Max? He would be happy if they did it, but no way would he get himself into the middle of that. He’d never killed anybody.

  Dave checked his watch. He was supposed to drive out to the property (there actually was a place for sale way out there in the boondocks, although he would not stop) and then, later today, meet up with them at the outlet mall soundstage and they would go from there.

  That was before they had asked him to kill Max.

  Did that ever come out of left field.

  But hadn’t he pictured himself shooting Max a dozen times? Confronting Max over that time in the canyon with Karen, and watching Max beg for his life?

  He felt the familiar rage build again. How they’d betrayed him, thinking he’d gone off ahead down the canyon. And yes, he had gone on ahead, but decided to go back for them. And that was when he saw them:

  His wife and his best friend.

  He should have confronted them then. But he didn’t. Instead, he’d swallowed his anger.

  His resentment only grew. Good ol’ Dave, Max’s best buddy since they were kids. What a joke.

  Dave had always known, if he were ever to go through with it, he’d hire a hit man.

  It had been easier just to go along with Jerry and Gordon’s plan, once he knew what they were doing. Let them take the risks. And then, this morning, when they’d met in Jerry’s suite—

  They told him that not only did they expect him to shoot Max, they wanted him to shoot an unarmed woman and her kid!

  The woman he’d solicited at the Safeway.

  Their killer, the crazy woman Shaun, turned out to be a no-show.

  And they expected him to do it? To shoot a woman and a child?

  Dave knew when something was doomed to fail. As much as he’d like to see Max dead, he wanted someone else to do it.

  Plu
s, he had his doubts he could even do it. Drill Max with two shots to the heart with a .22?

  Crazy. You had to be a stone-cold killer to do that. Even an expert marksman would be affected by executing a guy. It was bound to affect his aim.

  Jerry’d told him why they wanted Max to be shot in the chest with a .22. They wanted him to look good. “If somebody got into the morgue and got pictures of him, at least the wounds would be small and neat.”

  Small and neat.

  Jerry was in his own little world. The asshole spent too much of his time coming up with crazy schemes.

  It wasn’t going to work. Not when you dragged a woman and a kid into it. How do you keep a lid on that?

  As much as Dave hated his so-called best friend, he’d have to put his money on Max.

  At least he could save the woman and her daughter. He’d called earlier to tell her what time she should be at the outlet mall, giving clear directions to go to the back of the largest store in the middle of the mall. She didn’t answer her phone this time either. He waited for the tone and left a message, telling her the shoot was off and they didn’t need her after all.

  He hoped she got the message.

  Dave turned onto the main drag in Cottonwood, where he’d parked his truck and cargo trailer behind a Pep Boys store. He left the Cadillac in the parking lot of the Pep Boys, careful to wipe down the steering wheel, dash, car door handles, seats, and everything else he’d touched. He left the window rolled down and the keys in the ignition. With luck, somebody would steal the thing.